Reproduction, Technoscience, and the Body: Forced Sterilizations and Violence in Peru

Between 1996 and 2000, almost 300,000 Peruvian women were sterilized following
president Fujimori’s ‘National Program of Reproductive Health and Family Planning
1996-2000’. Promoted as a liberal-feminist enterprise at the International Conference
on Population and Development in Cairo (1994) and the Fourth World Conference on
Women in Beijing (1995), the program was supposed to empower women by giving
them education and choice regarding family planning and their reproductive health.
However, the program disproportionately targeted indigenous Quechua-speaking
women of rural areas of Peru living in extreme poverty, performing surgical
sterilizations on thousands of women without their consent, through coercion and
intimidation. By focusing on the material and technological semiotics of violence and
gender, this paper studies the ‘National Program of Reproductive Health and Family
Planning 1996-2000’ document as part of the conditions of possibility that enabled
coercive sterilizations and the construction of the bodies of indigenous women as the
objects of reproductive violence. Drawing on post-human and science and technology
feminist theories, I explore the scientific-technological aspects of reproductive control,
the production of gendered and racialized embodied subjects, and understandings of
violence in the context of the then on-going armed conflict between the Peruvian state
and Sendero Luminoso.